it's as though americans said to medical researchers, "tell us what we should and shouldn't eat, which vitamins to take, and how much to exercise, and don't bother us with how you found the answers or how sure you are."

..and reminders of what science needs to be.

the 1989 press conference of stanley pons and martin fleischmann, two chemists at the university of utah who claimed that they had attained cold fusion, is an example of the hazards of short-circuiting the peer-review process.

each study should therefore be considered a part of a mosaic of information that taken together yields the answer to a scientific question.

comparing the size of an effect with the probability that a given finding isn't due to chance is comparing apples and oranges.

although there are statistical methods for neutralizing confounding variables, they are not perfect, and they are of no use whatsoever unless the confounding variables are known and measured.

speaking to an interviewer: you're a complicated creature, as a biological organism. your capabilities span the range from mother theresa to hitler, fundamentally. and if i have to deal with all that complexity every time i'm interacting with you, i'm not going to have any energy left over to do anything productive...if you say something and then you do it, i can take you at your word and that makes our interactions productive.

the absolute is the sum total of everything. so if you think about things in their most unbounded possible form, if you think about things in their infinite number of potential variations, you can think about that as one pole of reality. it appears clasically that people have regarded their encounters with the absolute - which is all those multiple levels of being that are beyond your perceptual capacity - as equivalent to an encounter with god.

st. george is a different kind of individual. when the walls come crumbling down - as they always do - he decides to go out and confront the dragon. now dragons are very strange creatures, as you may have already noted. first of all, they don't exist. second of all, they have very weird propensities. so, for example, they hoard gold. and they tend to trap virgins in their lair, which you will also admit is very strange behavior for a reptile. now the idea behind this is..the thing that lurks underneath.. it means that the things that terrify you contain things of value..it means something else as well. it means that the individual man who's likely to go out and confront chaos when tradition is crumbling is more likely to find a mate.

i often ask my clients to do this. i say, watch your life for a week, and pretend you don't know who you are - because you don't know who you are. at all. what you understand most about yourself are the arbitrary presuppositions that you use to hem yourself in. and you act as if those presuppositions are true, so that the revelation of the full nature of your character won't terrify you..if you watch yourself for a week, you'll see certain things, you'll see some of the time that you're resentful and annoyed..some of the time you'll be bored..and some of the time you'll actually be engaged in life. and the times that you're engaged in life, you won't notice that you're there. the distinction between subject and object disappears when you're engaged in something that you find meaningful. the purpose of life, as far as i can tell from studying mythology and studying psychology for decades, is to find a mode of being that's so meaningful that the fact that life is suffering is no longer relevant..and i would say as well that people know when they're doing that. you know when you're doing that in part because you're no longer resentful, you think, geez i could do this forever. there's a timelessness that's associated with that state of being. from a mythological perspective, that's equivalent to brief habitation of the kingdom of god. that's the place where you are that's so meaningful that it enables you to bear the harsh preconditions of life without becoming resentful, bitter, or cruel.

almost all of the positive emotion that any of you are likely to experience in your life will not be the consequence of attaining things, it will be the consequence of seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value..most of your positive emotion is goal-pursuit emotion.